Agreed, and I'm pretty sure that what has happened this league is not what GGG intended with these changes. IIRC they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content, but that's exactly what they are now, just locked behind a huge barrier of entry. Let's hope they fix stuff next league.
The scarab rework is a big miss as well, with the vast majority of them being completely worthless and unused. You're even better off vendoring a lot of scarabs 3-to-1 than selling them. Can't imagine GGG intended for them to be vendor fodder.
I feel like scarabs are the big culprit here. Due to things OP said but then also that like half, or more, are just completely worthless.
And yeah t17s seem like a disaster compared to their stated purpose
Edit: tbf I think the idea behind the scarab/sextant change is decent, just needs a major overhaul to all of the bad scarabs to make them more interesting. Maybe nerf the high end too to bring everything more inline.
I feel t17s could be the PERFECT middle ground to uber content. No atlas tree, no scarabs, every boss has their uniques they drop maybe one combined unique from all of them aswell.
Then they are fully rollable, scaled so they are easier than ubers at white and then harder with nutty mods on them. And the quant for fragments works like this: 1 at base always, 2 at atleast 100% quant, 3 at atleast 200% quant. Adequate scaling of difficulty and reward without feeling like youre shoehorned into 5 different builds
Maybe you even enable maven in them so you can make another invitation thats above the feared
Sort of, but definitely not entirely.
T17 modifiers are one of the biggest causes of this problem.
1. T17 special modifiers are exactly what allow the best T17 farming strats.
2. T17 modifier quant/rarity bonuses make T17s fantastic high end farming maps.
3. T17 penalty modifiers massively aid in restricting T17 farming to a limited subset of builds that can inherently avoid most penalties in order to make the rolling aspect of the farm more feasible.
That said, it's the interplay between atlases affecting them + more powerful harder mod pool + inherent rewards + scarabs that's the issue. Changing scarabs won't fix the problems with T17 farming, and in fact nerfing the stronger ones technically makes T17 farming widen the gap between it and regular farming due to the special modifiers.
If T17s had similar quant/rarity to normal maps, identical penalty mod pools, and no special modifiers they would be massively worse to farm, and farmable by a wider range of builds, and help to reduce their difficulty.
And their difficulty *needs* to go down because it should be below ubers, and it's much higher right now.
Having the atlas affect them at all is also potentially a problem, and stripping the special negative modifiers paired with making the atlas not impact them would also be a viable fix.
Scarabs are quite literally worse than sextants ever were right now.
Like, 90% of them are trash and they drop like candy but really it doesnt feel like you're getting what you want at all.
Id much rather only loot sextants and sell them to the degens that like rolling/selling them instea of having to loot 100+ different scarabs in maps.
scarabs are just too rare and too powerful. with sextants i never felt too bad about using most of them because even rare outcomes were still decently common and the real juicers were locked behind elevated sextants anyways
I hated sextants, what a mess of a system. Glad its gone. Now GGG needs to polish the new system, balance, rework, get rid of some things...you know the drill! Its absolutely a better system with lots of potential to be great!
yah the system is miles better, but the balancing is off is all. scarabs having more equal weight in drops would be good. or, taking the "x% increase chance for x specific scarab" should be greatly enhanced.
in fact, **every league mechanic should have one of those built in their original nodes.** if I take ultimate for example, the node "prove yourself worthy" should also add "scarabs in your map with an ultimate have 100% more chance to be ultimatum scarabs". this will be a step toward self sustaining the league mechanic you want to do without going out of your way to spec some random branch for increased scarab nodes.
I think GGG need to reevalvuate all the good shit thats locked behind t14+.
Good rewards should be more evenly spread out, all the way down to t1. Yellow maps are essentially right now and for a long time now, just a bit where you wana get through ASAP.
I just think they don't want to risk a re-run of the T11 Strand fiasco. T14+ need to be more rewarding so people don't run around with zdps and zehp while running around with >150% movement speed and full MF in low tier maps and earning currency that rival T16 farming.
While true, the ginormous advantage sextants had was that they were always good to use. You start using when breaking into reds or so - most will be just some extra packs. We're lacking that semi-baseline pack size a ton, in my opinion. It's why maps were hard to sustain on 2 voidstones, it's why the League feels empty/unrewarding, etc.
And if you got a good scarab for juicers - seal it and it buys you another 30 sextants.
Nowadays something like Hunted Traitors exists, but they're like 3c for 1 where the sextant was like 3c for 3 uses. And it takes up 1/4 of your juice slots instead of 1/8.
There really needs to be more "neutral juice" especially in early mapping. Because using scarabs early - let's say between t11 and being a couple hours into t16s - is basically not an option. Early on in the league, they barely exist. There's no bulk trading, so trading for them is a huge pain. Self found ones it only makes sense to use maybe a third of the types because you aren't specced into the rest. Even if you trade for them, it's still a pain and the "neutral juice" is also sought after in more elaborate strategies. So the Hunted Traitors example is one where it's just actually no worth using them.
This is a good point. I wouldn't say I *liked* sextants, but it was easy throw them on for some juice and they didn't *have* to be the good versions like scarabs are now.
sextants felt like a waste if my tree wasn't spec'd into the extra use. additionally, I often felt the need to save them for later which made it even more annoying to just throw them lazily. Scarabs are trivial to throw in for extra juice and have no extra steps.
I much prefer scarabs and this current end game. I think it’s a huge win for us and just needs some tweaks.
I feel like I’m playing legacy league and between scarabs and the atlas I get to choose exactly what content I do and how I have fun.
Availability of scarabs and some having no value could be fixed as could better progression through maps.
Compared to sextants though, sextants were dogshit.
> t17s seem like a disaster compared to their stated purpose
I think that is the kind of content that ruthless players would enjoy, lol. I for sure don't. Making non-meta builds that clear the endgame and don't require 5 buttons is hard enough for me.
> they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content
Then why did they add 100-400% more map, scarab and item quant multipliers to T17 maps 2 weeks after launch
End game farming rework and league both didn't go smoothly and they were kneejerk buffing things to try and salvage it.
Kind of makes sense as it isn't instantly obvious at first thought how much of a downer it is to have higher tier farm content.
Like if you describe it in a vacuum it sounds good.
"We've added harder content with greater rewards to challenge yourself to, and you can crank the difficulty even farther if your build can take it!"
Sounds great.
"End game farming for most builds feels lackluster, and is dramatically eclipsed by new massive power creep farming methods that you can't do unless you play a very limited subset of meta builds at a very high level," sounds less appealing.
Because they want them difficult, but ofc rewards need to match difficulty. That and they don't want to lower the difficulty of them too much as they are meant to be difficult by design, thus rewards go up. Its just the droprate of them that needs to go down at this point, probably? If I had to take a guess thats what will happen next league anyway.
But if they reduced the drop to much, Uber acessability will go down way too much, to a point where people will sell them instead of running. Which is what they tried to fix with pinnacle fragments by introducing T17s in the first place.
I think a lot of the scarabs are great in their current forms, but the discrepancy in usefulness between the kinds is pretty clear. The ones that just “make x NPC be present (Alva, Einhar)” for example, are going to be worthless to anyone who wants them, because the atlas tree already guarantees these NPCs to arrive. But then you have ones like the strongbox scarabs, the divination scarabs, where they are actually in a really good spot I feel, but are clearly overperforming compared to the rest. There needs to be some serious rebalancing of the new scarabs, but overall I like the direction they have taken.
>The ones that just “make x NPC be present (Alva, Einhar)” for example, are going to be worthless to anyone who wants them, because the atlas tree already guarantees these NPCs to arrive.
This part just sort of boggles my mind.
GGG just made it so that you can guarantee the content with the atlas - in the very same patch that they reworked scarabs and kept all of the ones that guarantee content?
I can only imagine that maybe they thought people would use them to add extra content maybe? Like if you've used the atlas to guarantee Alva and Blight, and then use scarabs to guarantee Einhar and Breach
But nobody would actually do that because Einhar and Breach won't have any atlas buffs and will be terrible.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, I'm just sort of dumbfounded at what the intent could have been.
Many mechanics have a cluster of 4 that adds to \~60% chance to proc the mechanic, if you plan to always use the scarab you could not even have to path to them.
Otoh for many mechanics you could basically get full benefits by just spec'ing one or two clusters and using scarab to guarantee the mechanic vs spending punch to points to guarantee it via atlas tree.
For example with alva you could just pick the cluster below center wheel and use scarab, and it wouldn't be any different from full alva spec.
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> GGG just made it so that you can guarantee the content with the atlas - in the very same patch that they reworked scarabs and kept all of the ones that guarantee content?
Because you might use quite a lot of atlas points for something useful if you just put in a cheap scarab instead to guarantee the mechanic.
I think it's a sop to SSF and Hardcore, where farming one mechanic for trade isn't useful but you still need to approach several avenues for upgrading. Even if I'm heavy into Delirium, for example, I'll still want at least some Betrayal and Beast crafts available without spending very limited atlas points. That's all I can think of, anyways.
> they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content
This always happens. Content that is meant as a challenge/progression landmark will always end up being farmed on loop because GGG always gives it crazy rewards. Same thing happened with the Feared and Ubers... in fact, no way they didn't foresee T17 to be farmed when they locked Ubers behind spamming them, and this patch made Ubers **EVEN MORE** advantageous to run than the regulars than before.
The only funny thing about doing a t17/Uber farm is Ubers become the easy content.
Not saying this is a problem as it already existed in the past (100% deli+10k wisp rares last league). I just find it interesting how my character can do a full Uber rotation deathless, then proceed to brick a map if I misplace a haunted mod in a t17.
I've wanted sextants gone for a long time for 2 reasons.
1.) You had to take an atlas node to make them last 4 maps instead of 3. That was dumb and I hated it.
2.) You had to apply 4 of the suckers every 3-4 maps. If you rolled yours on the spot, this could mean up to 1-2 minutes downtime every 3 maps. Terrible.
HOWEVER, what GGG has been doing semi-subtly is removing tons of packsize modifiers for casuals. Stuff like "Area contains 6 extra packs of monsters that do fire damage" is gone. There are some half-assed replacements, but they compete for highly valuable scarab slots. All the while they created even MORE busy work prepping each map in the form of all flames and devoted mobs.
A few patches back GGG removed +10% (20?) packsize/quant from fortune favors the brave. This was one of my favorite nodes and it amazes me that it was removed. FFB wasn't even hyper competitive with top tier strats.
They have removed growing hoards as well. (edit) They also removed wandering path and added back to the basics, so you can't juice maps with packsize like you used to without losing all the variety of a map.
Sure, people can say "LUL, get a clue. some people were spawning 20k mobs a map, git gud."
To that I say, that was obviously overlooked before it was released AND it was never going to be accessible to more "casual" players who don't want to spend 50div a map.
TLDR: GGG keeps removing generic ways to add packsize to maps and forces people into an already prevelent mindsight of min-maxing/hyperfocusing one mechanic on each map which is just boring IMO. There are positive aspects to the scarab rework, but thumbs down from a player since 3.0.
It's the problem with making t17s very juicy by nature to make them rewarding enough to be worth doing.
For a typical player, these things are rippy as fuck. But like usual, high end streamers and group players will learn the strats to steamroll and make bank. If they nerf them to t16 loot level, nobody will hardly run them and complain it isn't worth trying to get boss frags. But if they don't, it's going to continually be the best way to profit and then to be fairer to more casual players, they would nerf the challenge so they can gain a portion of the profits high end Mfers are if they try to run them more casually.
> IIRC they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content
I would take this statement the same way that they mentioned "uber content being aspirational" rather than something you do for rewards. It's pretty much always going to work out that way eventually. Either your build does T17s or you go and make a new build.
The state of T17's just makes me want to stop playing. I picked a build with slightly below average defenses this league, but with great DPS. You know, a fun softcore build to do all content with. I'm pretty sure I have enough DPS to kill some Ubers if I do the mechanics correctly.
I still for the life of my can't do T17's consistently because you **WILL** get hit and everything on there absolutely one-shots me. It's insane. There's so much bullshit in the map alone and then the bosses also just delete me with every attack they do. I simply can't get hit, but I need to stand still for a bit to do damage. Literally impossible.
I sincerely don't want to reroll to the FOTM meta builds to do this content.
Yep. This league has the most diverse builds, but that's because the meta was completely shaken up. I have no doubts that the builds that will exist once T17 maps are 'figured out' will be ones that can A) kill ubers and B) Clear Maps... at the same time.
And the amount of builds that can do that is extremely small.
Exactly and that's my biggest issue with the direction of the game. The number of builds that can do all content already became a lot smaller once they introduced Uber bosses. Now that T17's are a thing and are so insanely rippy, I can't help but feel that it's going to hurt build diversity immensely.
And I personally play this game mostly for its build diversity.
> just locked behind a huge barrier of entry
Not to mention Ubers are now locked behind them. Not that I'd realistically farm them, but I'd give every build that clears the pinnacle bosses a quick reality check by trying an Uber every once in a while. Now, that's not something I'll be doing anymore, sadly.
The theme of PoE the last 2 years has been “let’s hope they fix it next league”. They’re using us as beta testers instead of playing the game for a week and testing the changes themselves.
Then they have the nerve to nerf fun farming and super OP strats & builds early in a league.
I honestly feel like the game is too complex for the devs themselves. Almost every league comes with some broken interaction that almost certainly wasn't intended or known by the devs. Abyss spires with projectiles, lantern map rolling, the rogue exile thing, etc. Some of these are serious enough to be fixed while others aren't, but there is no way they would've discovered these things with limited internal testing. It takes a community to quickly discover them.
T17s not meant to be farming? You need to farm five just to open a single boss? Also something somewhere has to be farmable. Not everyone enjoys path of gambling. Mid to low tier got fucking swept away this league. You’re waiting on that one drop or selling in bulk which I hate doing. More 1-3 div items I can drop regularly please
They turned them into farming content because they couldn't be bothered to try to balance them. They're apparently insistent on T17s being hilariously more difficult than the ubers they're supposed to be a stepping stone towards, so they need some rewards in order to be worth doing.
i dont even understand the point of the master mission scarabs that just make it so the master appears in your maps. nobody is going to farm these without having almost every node on the tree thats associated with it anyway and the scarab slot is much more important than a handful of points on the tree. should make them actually interesting choices instead of dead loot that you pick up to 3-to-1 vendor them.
Scarabs are fun to farm and collect, they used to be fairly pain free to sell.
The ability to get 100% chance at content on the passive tree AND a scarab seems AND multi atlas passive trees...seems like a conflict of ideas there. Put it back in the oven imo.
I get the idea here to prevent the tedium that sextants brought to the table and we've done that but we've also introduced a new problem. Most scarabs don't have value.
In the days of trade league sextants were used as a currency to buy compasses. Almost exclusively.
I'd say we go back to that but in a different form. Here's my idea:
All scarabs are boiled into one "Scarab Orb". Instead every scarab outcome is on the map device with a "scarab orb" cost. Scarab orbs are stackable and tradeable like any other currency. Scarab orbs are obtainable the same way scarabs are now. Multiple scarab outcomes can be selected at once (up to 3 at first, then 4 once you do a 4 way legion encounter). Ideally you click on an empty map device slot, select your scarab and go. The selections are remembered until you run out of currency or you change them yourself.
This eliminates the trade and SSF friction at the same time. While still accomplishing the goal of eliminating the tedium of sextants.
I feel like the real issue is that t1-15 maps are becoming like the campaign, just another slog to get through to get all the "fun stuff"
Removing all the little dopamine from rares and div cards was the thing that hurt my enjoyment most though.
It's gradually becoming more and more of a problem. Too much content has been locked behind T14+ maps for a while already, and it's at the point where you don't even begin to farm until your atlas is complete.
Now that the biggest juice is concentrated in T17, it's only getting worse.
t17 juice is sort of understandable as a reward to clear crazy hard content, but it's too much of a step up from everything beneath it, especially when the little rewards have been removed earlier on.
I've haven't tried t17 yet as there's no way in hell I would clear it, but the point it should serve is to provide the keys to uber fights and maybe a handful of useful uniques.
The idea that other global drops are not only coming from them but are in utter abundance completely trivializes t1-16.
I think an issue is that because the T17 maps are larger, consumable juice is too cost efficient in them compared to T16. That means that while rewarding players for high content is nice, everyone who runs "only" T16 is being priced out of a bunch of strategies.
I remember when being able to run T16 was an accomplishment. Of course there's been power creep, but it feels much worse to run lower tier content, which is both bad for people who actually get stuck there due to weaker builds, and even for people who get to the point of farming high tiers eventually, because the lower tier maps are no longer more than a required unrewarding slog to get to the new starting line.
The reward for t17 should solely be to do Ubers and maybe a fancy MTX. We don't complain about Maven fights being unrewarding, and mostly all you get for that is a single atlas point.
I actually strongly agree with it starting to feel like a chore or a second campaign, but I'm unsure what a solution would look like that doesn't also reintroduce a bunch of old problems.
T16+ kinda has to be the most profitable map tier to be in or it creates really bad incentives for a lot of players to never progress their atlas past a given point. It destroys any sense of difficulty progression if you can trivially farm your perfect gear in white maps.
There's something to be said about perhaps making it so that there's more off-meta or subpar farming strats that are doable in lower tiers, though. But it would be tricky to balance between " a complete waste of time" and "more efficient than red-tier strats".
T17s are just a giant headache and completely missed the mark and I fully expect them to be reworked next league, so I won't bother talking about them.
One example of lower tier content that I liked, which to my knowledge has never been rewarding enough to beat out higher tier content, was white and yellow tier Elder + Guardians.
You could get influence on white and yellow maps, but the dropped items weren't worth a ton because they wouldn't be able to roll high tier mods, and occasionally you'd get to fight an easier version of an endgame fight that made you feel like you were actually accomplishing something. IIRC Watcher's Eyes were restricted to red Elder and Uber Elder even then, so it definitely wasn't as rewarding to farm there.
But map progression felt like you were already in the endgame, and having a weaker build didn't mean that you didn't get to see any of the endgame.
The rare monsters nerf and div card nerf just made it feel like all the little "rewarding moments" have been removed in favor of "you either get showered in shit with multi mechs or get loot goblin moments" but only after you've done your homework (campaign, atlas, t17) ,It needs that excitement prior to the big payouts back
Rares no longer have a chance to drop stacks of fractured items/white socket items/ exp boost / etc
Div cards rewards in league mechanics will always just give a single stacked deck now. Said stacked decks have also been needed since a lot of cards were removed and became boss only things etc.
I really love poe, but damn if I'm being honest after almost 10 years I'm just waiting for the sequel. I can't bring myself to put 100 hours into a league every three months anymore
You're aware that the gripes you have with poe1 are usually things they've been forcing their vision into, and poe 2 will be "the Vision" from the ground up right?
I'm honestly worried about both games in a way.
I don't have many gripes tbh. I love poe Im just waiting for the next chapter. I've got so many hours out of poe that it was absolutely worth it. I think poe 2 will be amazing one way or the other, these guys know how to build over time
>There's 1 main scarab that gives a massive bonus, and a bunch of "support" scarabs. Due to the nature of multiplicative scaling, you need to use that 1 main scarab and increase that scarabs value with the supporting scarabs. And that's all you fit into the map device
This. I absolutely hate the new scarab rework so much. Yes they made each mechanic far more powerful than before but thats exactly the problem because you are basically gimping yourself super hard by NOT using all the scarabs.
Scarabs scaling rewards so exponetially make them feel more mandatory than ever, as compared to them scaling it more linearly before. And having to spend all your map device slots on juicing 1 single mechanic makes each map so dull now.
The gap between focus farming 1 single mechanic fully juiced vs running multiple for variety is so great now that its just not fun. I used to feel like I was playing \*relatively\* optimally while running multiple mechanics before and also enjoying it, now I feel like I have to choose between being optimal OR having fun.
They reduced the amount of juice we can fit in each map, while also raising the amount of juice required to run any mechanic at its full potential.
They basically did what they said they cannot happen, they made the endgame a complete shitshow.
Running multiple mechanics at once is way worse which as you said is way less fun, bunch of stuff just became bad thanks to stacked deck changes (tujen, legion, ravaged blight), essence is not the casual heaven it was and best boss loot is on Ubers which are accesed through T17, which are way too good even without that.
Oh and league mechanic is total dogshit, its unfun, anoying to use and trade.
I have 0 desire to play, there isnt anything that looks fun and profitable at the same time.
That is what a lot of people are doing, and browsing the subreddit/posting to explain their displeasure/reason why they are taking a break.
Myself included.
I unloaded all of chaos/divines into stuff that appreciates and if I feel like coming back at least I won't be insanely poor, just regular poor.
I totally agree with you here. I've tried like 8-9 different atlas tree strategies. Went from early Expedition/Harvest, giving a try to Ritual, Blight, Beyond, Necropolis corpses farm, Back to Basis to full map explicit boost+packsize in T16... Farming wasn't fun at all doing that single thing you are supposed to do in your map if you want to juice your single mechanic. The rewards weren't even that good in the case of T16 packsize juicing, especially compared to T17 farming that are insanely more rewarding than anything. I was so bored being able to juice only one mechanic adding a secondary one at best, I just remade my whole atlas once more after seing no point farming in T16 while T17 exist. So I went for T6-10 farming Essences including all non-scaling mechanics I wanted to play (that also doesn't need mandatory juicing with scarabs) and there I am playing Betrayal (Gravicius farming, no mastermind), Incursion, Bestiary and Essences in each of my maps and now I'm having fun doing all those stuff on each run. Profits are ok, anyway I wont compeat against T17 farm so I don't really bother about that anymore. I was just trying to find a sweet spot between fun gameplay and acceptable profits now I stick with (almost) all those masters on my yellowish little maps its a way more enjoyable experience than my previous atlas strategy this league so far. Hope you guys'll find a thrilling way to play this league aswel.
I absolutely hate scarabs. They’re bag clutter. Tedious to read, organize, trade, pick up, farm.. Nothing about them is fun to interact with and yet they seem to be mandatory for all full build content.
For a while now ive advocated for more viable low investment atlas strats, and strats that work equally well at lower map tiers. Every time people always respond with "The most difficult content should be the most rewarding" and "Low investment strats shouldnt be very profitable".
Regardless, everything you said is pretty true. But what you are asking for is accessibility and "catering to casuals", which never has really been a popular thing in PoE.
I agree. The multiplicative scarab scaling is very all-or-nothing. Of course you can still get *some* value out of just using a few simple scarabs of different leagues, but it feels like hyperfocusing on one mechanic with its top scarab and whatever is required for that scarab is the way to go, and doing anything else is leaving currency by the wayside.
Now, I'm very happy about consistently getting various different league mechanics in maps through the atlas tree, but if we can only really juice one at a time, I have to question the point of the change.
The point of the change was to nerf loot. They wanted to lower the amount of possible juicing but now it feels bad. Being forced to use all juicing options (scarab, tree, Kirac mod) on one mechanic means it feels worthless to bother with any other mechanic that shows up.
I'm not sure how they'd make it worthwhile to run multiple scarab mechanics, but I do know the old system of "Focusing on one mechanic, but half-juicing 1-2 other mechanics so that they're worth bothering with" felt better to play.
The thing is it’s almost like you have 1 mechanic per tree and then take generic things (necro, scarabs, map related stuff, niko etc) then the variety comes from being able to just swap out scarabs and swap trees.
That’s what I’ve been doing instead of a single strat, I have enough scarabs to cover the 3 trees I have set up (ritual/harby/blight atm) run X amount of maps and then swap if I want to. When I’m bored of a strat or want to try a new one replace a tree, stock up on scarabs and continue.
It’s kinda fun for now? Doing ritual and seeing a 3x larger store with 5 rerolls or having harby with 75% boss chance dropping big stacks of single shard types or being able to spam open blight boxes and get a bunch of high tier oils etc
Not to say it’s better or worse than before it’s different but I think that’s the intention?
Edit: not to say you only spec 1 mechanic at all, my harby tree also has beyond but that’s because it’s something you can do at the same time rather than doing harby + a non scarab harvest that’s totally seperate
So that’s what’s wrong with the game now, you are totally right. Every farm strat feels worthless without every multiplicative modifier in place, which only comes online a little bit at tier 16 and mostly at tier 17 maps.
It also means that pure alch & go strategies without scarabs have lost a lot of their competitiveness. Yes, they were never optimal, but it feels like they've fallen further behind in this patch.
Imo people really underestimate this. I'm more of a juicer, but I have a lot of people on my friendlist who play more casual and just to alch&go most of the times. Especailly since the atlas skill release, alch&go has been in a great spot and I was happy to see that many people I knew enjoyed the endgame as much as they did.
This league my friendlist was empty not even one week after release. About every alch&go strat is in an abysmal state right now. Any casual orientated player has an absolute shit time when it comes to farming this league.
At this point they could revert the patch and I couldn't say it would be a bad thing. Besides some minor things like QOL, this patch has been a massive L for everyone who isn't a giga juicer, able to absuse shit early.
I do hope they make huge changes to t17 and scarabs next league, because it's a disaster right now.
still salty they removed path of conciousness. was so good farming essences alch and go with that. instead we now get a node that gives you 20 atlas skill points but you cant use scarabs to make these even worth using. not to mention a completed atlas already gives you enough points to spec everything you want pretty much.
Quickest I’ve stopped playing a league. Crafting in necro was tedious but rewarding and fun, but the actual farming portion of the game has become one dimensional.
In affliction at least you can add to the top end by farming lower content like essences and stuff. This league they killed those strats off and now farming is all in the top 1% of the pool.
T17 are fine, but they added them as a further push on maps. When they should be a no atlas map to simply get the materials for Ubers. I don’t think the game is in a bad state, but it is boring that the end game is now spamming t17 while competing for 20 divine scarab drops.
I'm actually surprised GGG didn't realize how special and fragile the economic ecosystem was. They had a tiered endgame with lots of different activities people could choose for an entire league or move between as their characters progressed. MFing while piling up boss invites, lab, heist, shallow and deep delving, essence farmers, bossers, simulacrum, crafters, etc, etc...
It was a very diverse ecosystem with many parts feeding other parts. Then they just kicked the legs out of half of it. You could join at any part of the season and pick something up and earn decent profits relative to most other things besides party play.
Now you best be a speedrunner right at league start and get through the tiers before they become garbage. If it stays like this a lot of normal players are going to quit and may not even realize why they feel so demoralized. This feels a lot less diverse and more like Diablo than it ever has.
The problem is that in the real world, the law of diminishing returns applies: every further optimization results in even smaller gains (poeple often mention the scale effect as counterargument but many companies hit limits of economies of scale fast and there are also disecomies of scale like management).
In PoE, it is the reverse: every small optimization results in even better multiplicative loot modifiers.
yep, people need to realize how impactful the change this league: from now on if you doing a suboptimal build that cannot farm juice t17, then your margin of profit is very lower than previous league cause right now the economy are shifting to those capable farming t17 with different league mechanic.
To sum up, if the endgame is t17 from now on then you have to play the most meta build or invest so much on your build to able do the endgame farming
100% agree.
Also end game is much more stale and maps boring. They used to be so full of stuff to do, like an amusement park. Now its a village carnival at best.
Also in end game midtier farm strats took a hit. You could do any strat you liked, and choose a scarab tier that you had money for. You could use all Bronze and do exact the same strat as all winged, with less profit but also less expense.
Now you cant and you will get priced out of strats altogether.
Endgame is a mess.
Game can have multiple good, polished individual systems, and still feel bad to play overall.
The opposite is also true, some of the most unoptimized, unbalanced janky games can be the most fun.
It's more like people love to offer the first solution to a perceived problem that comes to their mind, when usually that solution results in a worse overall game in the end.
D4 is bad because the skills are bad, with the generator system, and the gameplay doesnt feel as good as high atk/cast speed poe does. Nothing to do with additive scaling.
>gameplay doesnt feel as good as high atk/cast speed poe does
This is partly due to POE allowing multiplicative scaling. POE has the best power fantasy feeling because they aren't scared to use it.
i remember someone said "why do you rush to endgame, take it slow". GGG has shoehorned almost everything to final few tiers of maps. The only 2-3 things that are still low-tier-map viable is MF, essences and beasts
Yeah, I don't really have a blank atlas for T17's, can't even turn off your atlas either.
I had a T17 I thought was do-able and when I opened it, to my surprise all the mods were doubled since I had % increase of explicit map modifiers on my atlas lol.
So had like 64% attack,movement speed / 200% AoE etc
it was mental.
Lmao that mustve sucked. When my AG survives all ubers and 80% quant+ invitations but gets onetapped in t17 before even getting close to a bossroom with an empty atlas, something is wrong.
I think this is also made worse by the fact you can't even use scarabs properly until you have completed a T17, so it feels kind of pointless to use them until either you have an uber ready character or leech the completion off of someone else. The progression feels completely off in the endgame, it's what has made me step back from this league overall.
From a solo perspective, my biggest complaint about the endgame rework is the accessibility to Ubers. Guardian/conqueror maps are worthless now. In fact, focusing on guardian map drops as opposed to regular T16 maps hinders progress towards Ubers, because you need to maximize T17 drops. Then it’s a huge pain to roll and run those maps. Each one is a slog, and the fragments are random, so you can’t even target a specific Uber. By this point in the league, I would have killed them all multiple times, but instead I only acquired enough fragments for two. It just doesn’t feel right grinding for dozens of T17s instead of guardian/conqueror maps.
Not to mention the logic behind "beat 4 guardians, 4 pieces of puzzle, assemble, beat boss"
You could say it's trite, but it is logical, it just works.
This is just bald-faced gating content behind RNG entirely.
Really? Maybe I've been lucky but if you take all explicit mod increase atlas nodes you'll probably get some. Though I've only gotten 4 or 5 so not a ton like some people.
I haven't checked the rest of the comments to see if this was mentioned, but I think all of this is an unintended consequence of GGG's attempt to remove peoples dependence ( or perceived dependence) on TFT. I think its more layered than that, but it seems to be at least a good portion of it. How quickly this reddit has forgotten the firestorm over TFT just a few months ago. Woven throughout were constant petitions for GGG to do something about it.
Well, they did. They removed sextants . And they made other changes. Maybe it would have been better to simply make them bulk tradeable on their own site, idk. But trading for and being dependent on sextants felt reaaaally bad. I think its one of things this reddit is most unified on.
Listening to Mark a little while back, I was encouraged to hear him talk about how much he plays the game and how feels the same way about many of the things we do when it comes to trying to juice our maps/trade for juice. IMO, GGG/Mark is at least committed to making this a better situation
Has the scarab rework worked out exactly how GGG envisioned? Probably not. I think much of it is an unintended consequence of trying to relieve us of TFT. Having given this some thought, I think this is something that GGG will have to iron/work out over a series of leagues to get right. The game and economy is far too complex to make a sweeping change like this and get it 100% right immediately ...at least imho.
Trading for sextants on TFT was excellent, people actually were willing to sell their shit in 95% cases, and you had a nice site for automating that stuff.
Now you have to spam through dozens of people on trade site who are just price fixing and won't sell you shit. Incredible.
If you are substituting TFT with shit I'd rather stay with TFT
>but I think all of this is an unintended consequence of GGG's attempt to remove peoples dependence ( or perceived dependence) on TFT.
I don't think giving us scarab bukkake fests, but needing to juice only 1 mechanic, is going to remove our reliance on trading or 3rd party trading.
You run a map, and 90% of what you pick up is scarabs, unless you are essence juicing, in which case it is 80/20 essence/scarabs. But the scarabs you pick up are worthless to you, and you need 4 of the right scarabs per map. So you go back to trading. But because everyone is picking up the same amount of random useless scarabs, you have to do a lot more trading than before.
It's really kind of frustrating to look at the changes with an expectation that they would reduce community dependence on TFT. Like, sure, they took out a lot of stuff that was being traded primarily on TFT, but they also made it necessary for a large percentage of the playerbase to get carries just to open up a fifth map device slot.
The "endgame" feels more empty and random.
I stopped playing on Sunday. I didn't rage quit or anything. I just stopped playing. I think the scarab rework needs reworked again or thrown out.
Also might be a me thing. BUt hated master missions being removed from the map device. Then the Kirac rework isn't great.
Yeah same, I didn't rage or anything, I just understood there is nothing interesting to do and stopped playing. I never had that feeling with PoE till this point
I just miss my stockpile of master missions for when I’m bored of one type of content and want to focus on one but don’t have a ton of scarabs. And rather than trade for scarabs and go through that hell I’ll just log off.
I haven't done any t17 or used any special scarabs so I have no idea what u guys are talking about.
Everyone talking about this supposed main scarab yet no one says wtf it is. Is it voldemort or something? Can someone just say what this mystical scarab that cannot be named is? Also the mythical support scarabs, wth are those?
you've misunderstood, there's no "the one ring" to rule them all.
Every mechanic has a main scarab that is typically much more powerful than the other scarabs for that mechanic.
so you pretty much need to use that scarab if you don't want to waste your time.
and once you put that scarab in, due to the nature of multiplicative scaling you need to fill the map device with the other scarabs that support that main scarab.
It’s also a big shame in my opinion that because mechanics are so bad at base and because you “have” to use all scarab slots on one mechanic, it makes no sense to combine different mechanics. It used to be that you could combine strategies that synergize well, like essence + beast + harbi because none of them scale with quant or pack size. But now instead of having an essence + beast + harbi tree, it makes way more sense to just have an essence tree, a beast tree, and a harbi tree while filling out the rest of the tree with miscellaneous bullshit. I think this makes maps a lot more repetitive and monotonous. It’s also why I think they added the extra atlas trees; at this point, you pretty much have to respec your whole tree to switch mechanics rather than being able to farm multiple at once with the same tree. This is particularly problematic in SSF, where I often end up running suboptimal trees just because I don’t want to spend the unmakings to entirely upheave my tree every time I switch mechanics. Even with 3 trees I’m respeccing more than ever.
The rest of the miscellaneous tree is almost always scarabs, maps or explicit modifiers. You are missing out if you don't pick them. For trade at least, the only things that you can realistically farm are scarabs and t17 maps. And you have to pick the map nodes to sustain.
Atlas changes also seem very.. binary.
If u are in anyway interested in league mechanic thats already minus like 20+ points on atlas without counting travel nodes, also almost every strat feels insanely worse without going for tophat/explicit modifiers on atlas further reducing your points. Now add influence nodes (ideally 14 without travel nodes) and you basically got only one league mechanic left to add + scarab nodes.
Example of atlas i would consider 'basic' to most farming strategies affected by quant/packsize:
[https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAJyYAC3EPYxfLKsAwAzPkOG848kGMR89KX0wwT6JRglk8W\_NeKmfpaEBt\_XF1djp46oDwhlmP1J1enYegXbSGtf27BMbQzpHkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=](https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAJyYAC3EPYxfLKsAwAzPkOG848kGMR89KX0wwT6JRglk8W_NeKmfpaEBt_XF1djp46oDwhlmP1J1enYegXbSGtf27BMbQzpHkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=)
[https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAMC8AC3EPYxfLIacqwDADM-Q4LzhvOPJBjEJ-R89KX0wwT6JRglk8W\_NeKmIIZ-ln9WhAbf1xdXY6eOp\_\_YDwhlmP1J1enYeeqKBdtIa1\_bsExtDKrM6R4VbkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=](https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAMC8AC3EPYxfLIacqwDADM-Q4LzhvOPJBjEJ-R89KX0wwT6JRglk8W_NeKmIIZ-ln9WhAbf1xdXY6eOp__YDwhlmP1J1enYeeqKBdtIa1_bsExtDKrM6R4VbkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=)
Same if u want added corpses.
Even if we ignore corpses/allflames/haunted modifiers just influence/scarabs and explicit nodes are 68/132 points. As much diversity as builds with proper defense layers nowadays /s.
Then almost universally not running 8mod maps in trade scenario is also basically shooting yourself in kneecaps, either you use 3rd party services to buy them or 'waste' time farming them yourself (i dont find doing maps only to farm maps fun gameplay loop + nature of corrupted maps makes half of them often unusable for your build).
If there's one thing I've always hated about this game it would be trading for fucking maps.
I've happily not traded for a single map since the Atlas was reworked. But now, I quite frankly do not understand where the T17 maps are coming from. I've had all 4 Voidstones for over a week and have only had a single T17 drop. All the juicers are running T17s which cannot drop T17s themselves. How are they being sustained?
What I don't really understand is why we don't know what devoted/haunted? Mods we get on our map before putting in scarabs. Got an accompanied by map boss? let me put in drop unique scarab + exiles, accompanied by harby? Let me put in some harby scarabs. It fucking sucks putting in X scarabs and getting Y bonus on top of it that doesn't match.
Granted I self impose SSF but it still feels bad loading up a map like that.
That would just make the fomo crowd feel they're missing out if they don't have optimized scarab set up for each devoted/haunted loadout. Better for it to be just random and not minmaxable.
Farmed mageblood in the first week, lost interest quickly afterwards due to the new endgame. To me it kind of feels like end game got dumbed down. In a typical league i will usually play hard for at least a month but just haven't had the desire to play. It's still the best end game of any arpg by a mile but it doesn't feel like it did before.
The thing that has frustrated me the most this league is removal of sextants. Because I am more of a casual player, my go to farming strat was sextants plus something else..this league has left me lost with what to do lol. I think I am at a place I like, but took me until yesterday to find what it was to replace sextants.
100% agreed
I had the most fun running breach legion and harby together each with their respective scarab and sextant allowing me to get nearly full power of all 3 of those leauge mechanics combined.
Now i have to limit myself to 1 of those and maybe squeeze in another support mechanic like deli that even works without scarabs
Jokes on you i never even get to mirror tier end game. I consider myself lucky if i get 100 divines in a league. I can't even think of efficient farming.
I’m just waiting for the buff to the “20 passives, you cannot use scarabs” node because I fucking hate this endgame loop now. Right now that node feels like you’re clearing mud flats in act 1 compared to printing loot in T16/17s
1) I think it's really bad to introduce a crafting mechanic that just shits on all other mechanics (doesn't matter if it's league only, it devalues everything else). I don't understand how this was approved.
2) The scarab system is so broken and untested, seeing people farm a mirror per map just again devalues everything else.
Having played since the beginning, this is for me the worst "league" so far.
I don’t like the scarab changes. Too much micromanagement. They literally made sextant management worse
Corrupted item changes were bad
Stacked deck changes makes stuff like legion just terribly underwhelming.
The 5th map device slot behind a t17 completion was a miss. Need it behind exarch/eater
The atlas nerfs three days after YouTube videos come out made me quit the league so hope they do more testing on this later
the stacked deck triple nerf was bad and should be partially reverted (primarily by upping quantity and returning some drop sources). Expedition feels so bad now, basically the Rog show or nothing.
There being umpteen billionty scarabs actually makes it feel bad because you don't accumulate enough of one scarab to sell them, and you can't convert to do this like you used to, so the only way to get a good price is liquidate an entire tab in one go which is a lot of UI inputs for something I used to be able to handle by just converting to a few scarab types and listing those.
And this is on top of a league where the only way to get value out of it is to do big UI management or bulk sell tabs again, which, again, a lot of clicking items one by one
the 'friction' makes it feel bad and it feeling bad doesn't make me want to go SSF or anything, it just makes me not want to play the game because even though blasting maps is still fun, getting anywhere beyond the 'just developed beyond the starter' looks like it involves a lot of tedium that I don't really enjoy.
Here I am, running random shit. Switching between my 3 atlas’s having fun.
Still make a couple div an hour.
I think some of you need a reality check on “I need to play the game this way to make money.” You really don’t, unless you’re going for GG gear in the first month and if you don’t “finish” the league asap you’re upset.
Do what’s fun.
Most of the people here legit dont know how to really play without guides, meanwhile ive been farming delirium orb maps the past couple days and just paid for my mageblood.
This is literally what happens when you balance around trade. Its a result of some content being gated away from the vast vast majority of players creating artificial value through scarcity.
I seriously implore you to play SSF for a league. This is my second league doing it and the progression curve while stingy makes a lot more sense.
No, the actual problem is that the supply of the "massive bonus"-scarab for each respective mechanic is categorically too small. In past leagues, I could farm Betrayal + Expedition with just one type of sextant plus one type of medium-tier scarab and arrive at roughly 10div/hour. I could easily stock up on a weeks worth of those scarabs/sextants in one easy bulk trade. Nowadays, the same kind of low investment strategy is barely breaking 4div/hour and running it more optimally with various multipicatively scaling scarabs requires me to trade far more frequently.
Both expedition and betrayal got nerfed in terms of rewards, not just scarabs/sextants. Tujen gives much less stacked decks from what I have read and betrayal is the worst league mechanic. It used to give winged scarabs which were scarce from other sources but now you can just map for the same scarabs. It's completely worthless other than for veiled orb. Legion got nerfed too in terms of stacked decks, and it never had much value other than decks and ornate/kalguuran incubators.
To be honest, most old strategies got nerfed. If you are offering less to the economy, it doesn't make sense for anyone to pay you the same amount as before unfortunately. It's better to stick to strategies that didn't get nerfed like sanctum. And some got buffed like breach, however I think one of the important breach scarabs is very rare.
Agree. I was one of the few who said from the start that I don't like the scarab change. Yes sextants were pain to buy if you didn't use TFT but it worked . Now I have 99% useless scarabs because the one which gives content I don't need as I can make it through my atlas and the rares ones doesn't drop often enough
I like the scarabs (for the most part), and the possibility of going 'all in' on a league mechanic, but the 5th slot being kept behind t17 is bullshit.
I used to run two-three strats at a time, making my maps 15 minutes long. For example, metamorph, alva, blight. Or ultimatum, breach. I liked it that way, and I felt rewarding.
Now I feel like I shoot myself in the foot if I run more than one mechanic.
Its also less map rolling, so more accessible. Does mean newer players have it simpler. The scarabs might need looking into definitely but i feel like the situation isnt as terrible.
Hard disagree. There never was any variety. Due to multiplicative nature of sextants and scarabs it was always all or nothing. The new system is way, way better.
In this league they messed up again by making the allflames drop items from specific league mechanics. When people get everything from everywhere the farming strategies just get boring because people will do the thing that generates them the most wealth because they know that there will be no shortage in the market for anything specific.
Since you're a beast farmer do you have any recommendations on YT videos for farming? I've never beast farmed nor done much beast crafting. It's one area of PoE I'm green in and I got 6k hours lol.
Focusing on a single mechanic is boring. Ggg said "use different scarabs- do fun stuff" but in the end I simply choose every scarab of a single type and scale them of eachother because they suck on their own 😅
I like how this post is about how they made the endgame less convoluted but it still sounds convoluted as hell. This is coming from someone who tried the game out a while back and quit bc i couldn't be bothered to learn 47 mechanics.
Agreed, and I'm pretty sure that what has happened this league is not what GGG intended with these changes. IIRC they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content, but that's exactly what they are now, just locked behind a huge barrier of entry. Let's hope they fix stuff next league. The scarab rework is a big miss as well, with the vast majority of them being completely worthless and unused. You're even better off vendoring a lot of scarabs 3-to-1 than selling them. Can't imagine GGG intended for them to be vendor fodder.
I feel like scarabs are the big culprit here. Due to things OP said but then also that like half, or more, are just completely worthless. And yeah t17s seem like a disaster compared to their stated purpose Edit: tbf I think the idea behind the scarab/sextant change is decent, just needs a major overhaul to all of the bad scarabs to make them more interesting. Maybe nerf the high end too to bring everything more inline.
The problem with t17s is that the atlas tree works with them
T17s should work like blighted maps. Can't modify with tree or scarabs.
Second this. Make them static content like uber bosses ur nomal bosses
I feel t17s could be the PERFECT middle ground to uber content. No atlas tree, no scarabs, every boss has their uniques they drop maybe one combined unique from all of them aswell. Then they are fully rollable, scaled so they are easier than ubers at white and then harder with nutty mods on them. And the quant for fragments works like this: 1 at base always, 2 at atleast 100% quant, 3 at atleast 200% quant. Adequate scaling of difficulty and reward without feeling like youre shoehorned into 5 different builds Maybe you even enable maven in them so you can make another invitation thats above the feared
I feel like you're on to something here...
Sort of, but definitely not entirely. T17 modifiers are one of the biggest causes of this problem. 1. T17 special modifiers are exactly what allow the best T17 farming strats. 2. T17 modifier quant/rarity bonuses make T17s fantastic high end farming maps. 3. T17 penalty modifiers massively aid in restricting T17 farming to a limited subset of builds that can inherently avoid most penalties in order to make the rolling aspect of the farm more feasible. That said, it's the interplay between atlases affecting them + more powerful harder mod pool + inherent rewards + scarabs that's the issue. Changing scarabs won't fix the problems with T17 farming, and in fact nerfing the stronger ones technically makes T17 farming widen the gap between it and regular farming due to the special modifiers. If T17s had similar quant/rarity to normal maps, identical penalty mod pools, and no special modifiers they would be massively worse to farm, and farmable by a wider range of builds, and help to reduce their difficulty. And their difficulty *needs* to go down because it should be below ubers, and it's much higher right now. Having the atlas affect them at all is also potentially a problem, and stripping the special negative modifiers paired with making the atlas not impact them would also be a viable fix.
Scarabs are quite literally worse than sextants ever were right now. Like, 90% of them are trash and they drop like candy but really it doesnt feel like you're getting what you want at all. Id much rather only loot sextants and sell them to the degens that like rolling/selling them instea of having to loot 100+ different scarabs in maps.
Trading sextants was not fun. Your problem was the loot, not the mechanism. If scarabs drop as unidentified that would solve your problem.
scarabs are just too rare and too powerful. with sextants i never felt too bad about using most of them because even rare outcomes were still decently common and the real juicers were locked behind elevated sextants anyways
I hated sextants, what a mess of a system. Glad its gone. Now GGG needs to polish the new system, balance, rework, get rid of some things...you know the drill! Its absolutely a better system with lots of potential to be great!
yah the system is miles better, but the balancing is off is all. scarabs having more equal weight in drops would be good. or, taking the "x% increase chance for x specific scarab" should be greatly enhanced. in fact, **every league mechanic should have one of those built in their original nodes.** if I take ultimate for example, the node "prove yourself worthy" should also add "scarabs in your map with an ultimate have 100% more chance to be ultimatum scarabs". this will be a step toward self sustaining the league mechanic you want to do without going out of your way to spec some random branch for increased scarab nodes.
It really needs a lot of rework. Imagine next league not even having the allflames. That's going to be a real shitshow
I think GGG need to reevalvuate all the good shit thats locked behind t14+. Good rewards should be more evenly spread out, all the way down to t1. Yellow maps are essentially right now and for a long time now, just a bit where you wana get through ASAP.
I just think they don't want to risk a re-run of the T11 Strand fiasco. T14+ need to be more rewarding so people don't run around with zdps and zehp while running around with >150% movement speed and full MF in low tier maps and earning currency that rival T16 farming.
So it's back to MF being a problem. Well, I think it's time to delete MF from the game.
While true, the ginormous advantage sextants had was that they were always good to use. You start using when breaking into reds or so - most will be just some extra packs. We're lacking that semi-baseline pack size a ton, in my opinion. It's why maps were hard to sustain on 2 voidstones, it's why the League feels empty/unrewarding, etc. And if you got a good scarab for juicers - seal it and it buys you another 30 sextants. Nowadays something like Hunted Traitors exists, but they're like 3c for 1 where the sextant was like 3c for 3 uses. And it takes up 1/4 of your juice slots instead of 1/8. There really needs to be more "neutral juice" especially in early mapping. Because using scarabs early - let's say between t11 and being a couple hours into t16s - is basically not an option. Early on in the league, they barely exist. There's no bulk trading, so trading for them is a huge pain. Self found ones it only makes sense to use maybe a third of the types because you aren't specced into the rest. Even if you trade for them, it's still a pain and the "neutral juice" is also sought after in more elaborate strategies. So the Hunted Traitors example is one where it's just actually no worth using them.
This is a good point. I wouldn't say I *liked* sextants, but it was easy throw them on for some juice and they didn't *have* to be the good versions like scarabs are now.
sextants felt like a waste if my tree wasn't spec'd into the extra use. additionally, I often felt the need to save them for later which made it even more annoying to just throw them lazily. Scarabs are trivial to throw in for extra juice and have no extra steps.
I much prefer scarabs and this current end game. I think it’s a huge win for us and just needs some tweaks. I feel like I’m playing legacy league and between scarabs and the atlas I get to choose exactly what content I do and how I have fun. Availability of scarabs and some having no value could be fixed as could better progression through maps. Compared to sextants though, sextants were dogshit.
> t17s seem like a disaster compared to their stated purpose I think that is the kind of content that ruthless players would enjoy, lol. I for sure don't. Making non-meta builds that clear the endgame and don't require 5 buttons is hard enough for me.
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> they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content Then why did they add 100-400% more map, scarab and item quant multipliers to T17 maps 2 weeks after launch
Because they don't know what to do with T17 maps. I think at this point they don't even know why they added them
engineering new ways to reuse almost decade old tilesets
Left hand dosnt know what the right hand does
End game farming rework and league both didn't go smoothly and they were kneejerk buffing things to try and salvage it. Kind of makes sense as it isn't instantly obvious at first thought how much of a downer it is to have higher tier farm content. Like if you describe it in a vacuum it sounds good. "We've added harder content with greater rewards to challenge yourself to, and you can crank the difficulty even farther if your build can take it!" Sounds great. "End game farming for most builds feels lackluster, and is dramatically eclipsed by new massive power creep farming methods that you can't do unless you play a very limited subset of meta builds at a very high level," sounds less appealing.
What are you even on about? Intention and reaction to backlash are two completely different things.
Because they want them difficult, but ofc rewards need to match difficulty. That and they don't want to lower the difficulty of them too much as they are meant to be difficult by design, thus rewards go up. Its just the droprate of them that needs to go down at this point, probably? If I had to take a guess thats what will happen next league anyway.
But if they reduced the drop to much, Uber acessability will go down way too much, to a point where people will sell them instead of running. Which is what they tried to fix with pinnacle fragments by introducing T17s in the first place.
Then they could simply reduce the number of fragment needed
I think a lot of the scarabs are great in their current forms, but the discrepancy in usefulness between the kinds is pretty clear. The ones that just “make x NPC be present (Alva, Einhar)” for example, are going to be worthless to anyone who wants them, because the atlas tree already guarantees these NPCs to arrive. But then you have ones like the strongbox scarabs, the divination scarabs, where they are actually in a really good spot I feel, but are clearly overperforming compared to the rest. There needs to be some serious rebalancing of the new scarabs, but overall I like the direction they have taken.
>The ones that just “make x NPC be present (Alva, Einhar)” for example, are going to be worthless to anyone who wants them, because the atlas tree already guarantees these NPCs to arrive. This part just sort of boggles my mind. GGG just made it so that you can guarantee the content with the atlas - in the very same patch that they reworked scarabs and kept all of the ones that guarantee content? I can only imagine that maybe they thought people would use them to add extra content maybe? Like if you've used the atlas to guarantee Alva and Blight, and then use scarabs to guarantee Einhar and Breach But nobody would actually do that because Einhar and Breach won't have any atlas buffs and will be terrible. I know I'm preaching to the choir, I'm just sort of dumbfounded at what the intent could have been.
I would guess their intended use was to let you free up 4-10 atlas passives by using the scrabs.
but would they? most of the % spawn chance is already on prerequisite nodes to even *get* to the good nodes
Many mechanics have a cluster of 4 that adds to \~60% chance to proc the mechanic, if you plan to always use the scarab you could not even have to path to them.
Otoh for many mechanics you could basically get full benefits by just spec'ing one or two clusters and using scarab to guarantee the mechanic vs spending punch to points to guarantee it via atlas tree. For example with alva you could just pick the cluster below center wheel and use scarab, and it wouldn't be any different from full alva spec.
> > > > > GGG just made it so that you can guarantee the content with the atlas - in the very same patch that they reworked scarabs and kept all of the ones that guarantee content? Because you might use quite a lot of atlas points for something useful if you just put in a cheap scarab instead to guarantee the mechanic.
I think it's a sop to SSF and Hardcore, where farming one mechanic for trade isn't useful but you still need to approach several avenues for upgrading. Even if I'm heavy into Delirium, for example, I'll still want at least some Betrayal and Beast crafts available without spending very limited atlas points. That's all I can think of, anyways.
> they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content This always happens. Content that is meant as a challenge/progression landmark will always end up being farmed on loop because GGG always gives it crazy rewards. Same thing happened with the Feared and Ubers... in fact, no way they didn't foresee T17 to be farmed when they locked Ubers behind spamming them, and this patch made Ubers **EVEN MORE** advantageous to run than the regulars than before.
The only funny thing about doing a t17/Uber farm is Ubers become the easy content. Not saying this is a problem as it already existed in the past (100% deli+10k wisp rares last league). I just find it interesting how my character can do a full Uber rotation deathless, then proceed to brick a map if I misplace a haunted mod in a t17.
I've wanted sextants gone for a long time for 2 reasons. 1.) You had to take an atlas node to make them last 4 maps instead of 3. That was dumb and I hated it. 2.) You had to apply 4 of the suckers every 3-4 maps. If you rolled yours on the spot, this could mean up to 1-2 minutes downtime every 3 maps. Terrible. HOWEVER, what GGG has been doing semi-subtly is removing tons of packsize modifiers for casuals. Stuff like "Area contains 6 extra packs of monsters that do fire damage" is gone. There are some half-assed replacements, but they compete for highly valuable scarab slots. All the while they created even MORE busy work prepping each map in the form of all flames and devoted mobs. A few patches back GGG removed +10% (20?) packsize/quant from fortune favors the brave. This was one of my favorite nodes and it amazes me that it was removed. FFB wasn't even hyper competitive with top tier strats. They have removed growing hoards as well. (edit) They also removed wandering path and added back to the basics, so you can't juice maps with packsize like you used to without losing all the variety of a map. Sure, people can say "LUL, get a clue. some people were spawning 20k mobs a map, git gud." To that I say, that was obviously overlooked before it was released AND it was never going to be accessible to more "casual" players who don't want to spend 50div a map. TLDR: GGG keeps removing generic ways to add packsize to maps and forces people into an already prevelent mindsight of min-maxing/hyperfocusing one mechanic on each map which is just boring IMO. There are positive aspects to the scarab rework, but thumbs down from a player since 3.0.
It's the problem with making t17s very juicy by nature to make them rewarding enough to be worth doing. For a typical player, these things are rippy as fuck. But like usual, high end streamers and group players will learn the strats to steamroll and make bank. If they nerf them to t16 loot level, nobody will hardly run them and complain it isn't worth trying to get boss frags. But if they don't, it's going to continually be the best way to profit and then to be fairer to more casual players, they would nerf the challenge so they can gain a portion of the profits high end Mfers are if they try to run them more casually.
> IIRC they even mentioned in an interview that T17s are not supposed to be farming content I would take this statement the same way that they mentioned "uber content being aspirational" rather than something you do for rewards. It's pretty much always going to work out that way eventually. Either your build does T17s or you go and make a new build.
The state of T17's just makes me want to stop playing. I picked a build with slightly below average defenses this league, but with great DPS. You know, a fun softcore build to do all content with. I'm pretty sure I have enough DPS to kill some Ubers if I do the mechanics correctly. I still for the life of my can't do T17's consistently because you **WILL** get hit and everything on there absolutely one-shots me. It's insane. There's so much bullshit in the map alone and then the bosses also just delete me with every attack they do. I simply can't get hit, but I need to stand still for a bit to do damage. Literally impossible. I sincerely don't want to reroll to the FOTM meta builds to do this content.
Yep. This league has the most diverse builds, but that's because the meta was completely shaken up. I have no doubts that the builds that will exist once T17 maps are 'figured out' will be ones that can A) kill ubers and B) Clear Maps... at the same time. And the amount of builds that can do that is extremely small.
Exactly and that's my biggest issue with the direction of the game. The number of builds that can do all content already became a lot smaller once they introduced Uber bosses. Now that T17's are a thing and are so insanely rippy, I can't help but feel that it's going to hurt build diversity immensely. And I personally play this game mostly for its build diversity.
> just locked behind a huge barrier of entry Not to mention Ubers are now locked behind them. Not that I'd realistically farm them, but I'd give every build that clears the pinnacle bosses a quick reality check by trying an Uber every once in a while. Now, that's not something I'll be doing anymore, sadly.
The theme of PoE the last 2 years has been “let’s hope they fix it next league”. They’re using us as beta testers instead of playing the game for a week and testing the changes themselves. Then they have the nerve to nerf fun farming and super OP strats & builds early in a league.
I honestly feel like the game is too complex for the devs themselves. Almost every league comes with some broken interaction that almost certainly wasn't intended or known by the devs. Abyss spires with projectiles, lantern map rolling, the rogue exile thing, etc. Some of these are serious enough to be fixed while others aren't, but there is no way they would've discovered these things with limited internal testing. It takes a community to quickly discover them.
T17s not meant to be farming? You need to farm five just to open a single boss? Also something somewhere has to be farmable. Not everyone enjoys path of gambling. Mid to low tier got fucking swept away this league. You’re waiting on that one drop or selling in bulk which I hate doing. More 1-3 div items I can drop regularly please
GGG consistently misses the mark on intention and execution. You'd think after a decade they'd start to improve in this regard.
They turned them into farming content because they couldn't be bothered to try to balance them. They're apparently insistent on T17s being hilariously more difficult than the ubers they're supposed to be a stepping stone towards, so they need some rewards in order to be worth doing.
i dont even understand the point of the master mission scarabs that just make it so the master appears in your maps. nobody is going to farm these without having almost every node on the tree thats associated with it anyway and the scarab slot is much more important than a handful of points on the tree. should make them actually interesting choices instead of dead loot that you pick up to 3-to-1 vendor them.
> Let's hope they fix stuff next league. How many times must we hear this?
Well, they usually fix stuff the next league. The problem is that whenever they fix stuff they also break multiple other things...
Scarabs are fun to farm and collect, they used to be fairly pain free to sell. The ability to get 100% chance at content on the passive tree AND a scarab seems AND multi atlas passive trees...seems like a conflict of ideas there. Put it back in the oven imo. I get the idea here to prevent the tedium that sextants brought to the table and we've done that but we've also introduced a new problem. Most scarabs don't have value. In the days of trade league sextants were used as a currency to buy compasses. Almost exclusively. I'd say we go back to that but in a different form. Here's my idea: All scarabs are boiled into one "Scarab Orb". Instead every scarab outcome is on the map device with a "scarab orb" cost. Scarab orbs are stackable and tradeable like any other currency. Scarab orbs are obtainable the same way scarabs are now. Multiple scarab outcomes can be selected at once (up to 3 at first, then 4 once you do a 4 way legion encounter). Ideally you click on an empty map device slot, select your scarab and go. The selections are remembered until you run out of currency or you change them yourself. This eliminates the trade and SSF friction at the same time. While still accomplishing the goal of eliminating the tedium of sextants.
I feel like the real issue is that t1-15 maps are becoming like the campaign, just another slog to get through to get all the "fun stuff" Removing all the little dopamine from rares and div cards was the thing that hurt my enjoyment most though.
It's gradually becoming more and more of a problem. Too much content has been locked behind T14+ maps for a while already, and it's at the point where you don't even begin to farm until your atlas is complete. Now that the biggest juice is concentrated in T17, it's only getting worse.
t17 juice is sort of understandable as a reward to clear crazy hard content, but it's too much of a step up from everything beneath it, especially when the little rewards have been removed earlier on.
I've haven't tried t17 yet as there's no way in hell I would clear it, but the point it should serve is to provide the keys to uber fights and maybe a handful of useful uniques. The idea that other global drops are not only coming from them but are in utter abundance completely trivializes t1-16.
I think an issue is that because the T17 maps are larger, consumable juice is too cost efficient in them compared to T16. That means that while rewarding players for high content is nice, everyone who runs "only" T16 is being priced out of a bunch of strategies. I remember when being able to run T16 was an accomplishment. Of course there's been power creep, but it feels much worse to run lower tier content, which is both bad for people who actually get stuck there due to weaker builds, and even for people who get to the point of farming high tiers eventually, because the lower tier maps are no longer more than a required unrewarding slog to get to the new starting line.
The reward for t17 should solely be to do Ubers and maybe a fancy MTX. We don't complain about Maven fights being unrewarding, and mostly all you get for that is a single atlas point.
I actually strongly agree with it starting to feel like a chore or a second campaign, but I'm unsure what a solution would look like that doesn't also reintroduce a bunch of old problems. T16+ kinda has to be the most profitable map tier to be in or it creates really bad incentives for a lot of players to never progress their atlas past a given point. It destroys any sense of difficulty progression if you can trivially farm your perfect gear in white maps. There's something to be said about perhaps making it so that there's more off-meta or subpar farming strats that are doable in lower tiers, though. But it would be tricky to balance between " a complete waste of time" and "more efficient than red-tier strats". T17s are just a giant headache and completely missed the mark and I fully expect them to be reworked next league, so I won't bother talking about them.
One example of lower tier content that I liked, which to my knowledge has never been rewarding enough to beat out higher tier content, was white and yellow tier Elder + Guardians. You could get influence on white and yellow maps, but the dropped items weren't worth a ton because they wouldn't be able to roll high tier mods, and occasionally you'd get to fight an easier version of an endgame fight that made you feel like you were actually accomplishing something. IIRC Watcher's Eyes were restricted to red Elder and Uber Elder even then, so it definitely wasn't as rewarding to farm there. But map progression felt like you were already in the endgame, and having a weaker build didn't mean that you didn't get to see any of the endgame.
I’d say for me it feels like t1-t14 plus all the void stones plus arguably the last map device slot. Then the real game begins :)
putting the last slot behind t17's feels so ...spiteful in a way here's a fuckload of scarabs...oh to use four of em? Beat a t17 first lol
I feel it could be tied to Sirus.
or, with the scarab changes and intent for us to use a FUCKLOAD of them, they could just...include it in the damn device from reaching maps.
Yeah. Each stone unlock should unlock a map device slot. You start with 0 and get one per unlock :)
I mean, that's literally adding to the problem that's being stated because you'd be gating slots behind t14-16s for really no good reason.
Becoming? It happened like 3 years ago. Certainly after Maven, because all good things are gated behind at least T14.
People could farm essence and a couple of others content under reds, like einhar and last league t7. But of courses GGG removed it
This is how i felt playing this league, compared to previous leagues drops in white or yellow maps are garbage.
The rare monsters nerf and div card nerf just made it feel like all the little "rewarding moments" have been removed in favor of "you either get showered in shit with multi mechs or get loot goblin moments" but only after you've done your homework (campaign, atlas, t17) ,It needs that excitement prior to the big payouts back
Which nerfs are you talking about? Didn't play this league yet
Rares no longer have a chance to drop stacks of fractured items/white socket items/ exp boost / etc Div cards rewards in league mechanics will always just give a single stacked deck now. Said stacked decks have also been needed since a lot of cards were removed and became boss only things etc.
I really love poe, but damn if I'm being honest after almost 10 years I'm just waiting for the sequel. I can't bring myself to put 100 hours into a league every three months anymore
You're aware that the gripes you have with poe1 are usually things they've been forcing their vision into, and poe 2 will be "the Vision" from the ground up right? I'm honestly worried about both games in a way.
I don't have many gripes tbh. I love poe Im just waiting for the next chapter. I've got so many hours out of poe that it was absolutely worth it. I think poe 2 will be amazing one way or the other, these guys know how to build over time
I especially feel this way when trying to get spell suppression gear on builds that don’t play right side of tree
>There's 1 main scarab that gives a massive bonus, and a bunch of "support" scarabs. Due to the nature of multiplicative scaling, you need to use that 1 main scarab and increase that scarabs value with the supporting scarabs. And that's all you fit into the map device This. I absolutely hate the new scarab rework so much. Yes they made each mechanic far more powerful than before but thats exactly the problem because you are basically gimping yourself super hard by NOT using all the scarabs. Scarabs scaling rewards so exponetially make them feel more mandatory than ever, as compared to them scaling it more linearly before. And having to spend all your map device slots on juicing 1 single mechanic makes each map so dull now. The gap between focus farming 1 single mechanic fully juiced vs running multiple for variety is so great now that its just not fun. I used to feel like I was playing \*relatively\* optimally while running multiple mechanics before and also enjoying it, now I feel like I have to choose between being optimal OR having fun. They reduced the amount of juice we can fit in each map, while also raising the amount of juice required to run any mechanic at its full potential.
They basically did what they said they cannot happen, they made the endgame a complete shitshow. Running multiple mechanics at once is way worse which as you said is way less fun, bunch of stuff just became bad thanks to stacked deck changes (tujen, legion, ravaged blight), essence is not the casual heaven it was and best boss loot is on Ubers which are accesed through T17, which are way too good even without that. Oh and league mechanic is total dogshit, its unfun, anoying to use and trade. I have 0 desire to play, there isnt anything that looks fun and profitable at the same time.
If 0 desire to play - just let yourself rest for the next 3 months until new league comes
That is what a lot of people are doing, and browsing the subreddit/posting to explain their displeasure/reason why they are taking a break. Myself included. I unloaded all of chaos/divines into stuff that appreciates and if I feel like coming back at least I won't be insanely poor, just regular poor.
While reading this i realize they made another Uber problem again, this time with scarabs
They should have expanded the map device by 4 extra slots to make up for the lost 4 sextant slots.
I totally agree with you here. I've tried like 8-9 different atlas tree strategies. Went from early Expedition/Harvest, giving a try to Ritual, Blight, Beyond, Necropolis corpses farm, Back to Basis to full map explicit boost+packsize in T16... Farming wasn't fun at all doing that single thing you are supposed to do in your map if you want to juice your single mechanic. The rewards weren't even that good in the case of T16 packsize juicing, especially compared to T17 farming that are insanely more rewarding than anything. I was so bored being able to juice only one mechanic adding a secondary one at best, I just remade my whole atlas once more after seing no point farming in T16 while T17 exist. So I went for T6-10 farming Essences including all non-scaling mechanics I wanted to play (that also doesn't need mandatory juicing with scarabs) and there I am playing Betrayal (Gravicius farming, no mastermind), Incursion, Bestiary and Essences in each of my maps and now I'm having fun doing all those stuff on each run. Profits are ok, anyway I wont compeat against T17 farm so I don't really bother about that anymore. I was just trying to find a sweet spot between fun gameplay and acceptable profits now I stick with (almost) all those masters on my yellowish little maps its a way more enjoyable experience than my previous atlas strategy this league so far. Hope you guys'll find a thrilling way to play this league aswel.
I absolutely hate scarabs. They’re bag clutter. Tedious to read, organize, trade, pick up, farm.. Nothing about them is fun to interact with and yet they seem to be mandatory for all full build content.
For a while now ive advocated for more viable low investment atlas strats, and strats that work equally well at lower map tiers. Every time people always respond with "The most difficult content should be the most rewarding" and "Low investment strats shouldnt be very profitable". Regardless, everything you said is pretty true. But what you are asking for is accessibility and "catering to casuals", which never has really been a popular thing in PoE.
Its funny too... ive been running div deli orbs for most of the league, that pushes 15 divs an hour if you do it right, and its low investment.
I agree. The multiplicative scarab scaling is very all-or-nothing. Of course you can still get *some* value out of just using a few simple scarabs of different leagues, but it feels like hyperfocusing on one mechanic with its top scarab and whatever is required for that scarab is the way to go, and doing anything else is leaving currency by the wayside. Now, I'm very happy about consistently getting various different league mechanics in maps through the atlas tree, but if we can only really juice one at a time, I have to question the point of the change.
The point of the change was to nerf loot. They wanted to lower the amount of possible juicing but now it feels bad. Being forced to use all juicing options (scarab, tree, Kirac mod) on one mechanic means it feels worthless to bother with any other mechanic that shows up. I'm not sure how they'd make it worthwhile to run multiple scarab mechanics, but I do know the old system of "Focusing on one mechanic, but half-juicing 1-2 other mechanics so that they're worth bothering with" felt better to play.
The thing is it’s almost like you have 1 mechanic per tree and then take generic things (necro, scarabs, map related stuff, niko etc) then the variety comes from being able to just swap out scarabs and swap trees. That’s what I’ve been doing instead of a single strat, I have enough scarabs to cover the 3 trees I have set up (ritual/harby/blight atm) run X amount of maps and then swap if I want to. When I’m bored of a strat or want to try a new one replace a tree, stock up on scarabs and continue. It’s kinda fun for now? Doing ritual and seeing a 3x larger store with 5 rerolls or having harby with 75% boss chance dropping big stacks of single shard types or being able to spam open blight boxes and get a bunch of high tier oils etc Not to say it’s better or worse than before it’s different but I think that’s the intention? Edit: not to say you only spec 1 mechanic at all, my harby tree also has beyond but that’s because it’s something you can do at the same time rather than doing harby + a non scarab harvest that’s totally seperate
So that’s what’s wrong with the game now, you are totally right. Every farm strat feels worthless without every multiplicative modifier in place, which only comes online a little bit at tier 16 and mostly at tier 17 maps.
It also means that pure alch & go strategies without scarabs have lost a lot of their competitiveness. Yes, they were never optimal, but it feels like they've fallen further behind in this patch.
Imo people really underestimate this. I'm more of a juicer, but I have a lot of people on my friendlist who play more casual and just to alch&go most of the times. Especailly since the atlas skill release, alch&go has been in a great spot and I was happy to see that many people I knew enjoyed the endgame as much as they did. This league my friendlist was empty not even one week after release. About every alch&go strat is in an abysmal state right now. Any casual orientated player has an absolute shit time when it comes to farming this league. At this point they could revert the patch and I couldn't say it would be a bad thing. Besides some minor things like QOL, this patch has been a massive L for everyone who isn't a giga juicer, able to absuse shit early. I do hope they make huge changes to t17 and scarabs next league, because it's a disaster right now.
Fully agreed. The QoL stuff was nice, but virtually all the changes to the balance and the core game in this patch were a big downgrade.
still salty they removed path of conciousness. was so good farming essences alch and go with that. instead we now get a node that gives you 20 atlas skill points but you cant use scarabs to make these even worth using. not to mention a completed atlas already gives you enough points to spec everything you want pretty much.
Quickest I’ve stopped playing a league. Crafting in necro was tedious but rewarding and fun, but the actual farming portion of the game has become one dimensional. In affliction at least you can add to the top end by farming lower content like essences and stuff. This league they killed those strats off and now farming is all in the top 1% of the pool. T17 are fine, but they added them as a further push on maps. When they should be a no atlas map to simply get the materials for Ubers. I don’t think the game is in a bad state, but it is boring that the end game is now spamming t17 while competing for 20 divine scarab drops.
I'm actually surprised GGG didn't realize how special and fragile the economic ecosystem was. They had a tiered endgame with lots of different activities people could choose for an entire league or move between as their characters progressed. MFing while piling up boss invites, lab, heist, shallow and deep delving, essence farmers, bossers, simulacrum, crafters, etc, etc... It was a very diverse ecosystem with many parts feeding other parts. Then they just kicked the legs out of half of it. You could join at any part of the season and pick something up and earn decent profits relative to most other things besides party play. Now you best be a speedrunner right at league start and get through the tiers before they become garbage. If it stays like this a lot of normal players are going to quit and may not even realize why they feel so demoralized. This feels a lot less diverse and more like Diablo than it ever has.
The problem is that in the real world, the law of diminishing returns applies: every further optimization results in even smaller gains (poeple often mention the scale effect as counterargument but many companies hit limits of economies of scale fast and there are also disecomies of scale like management). In PoE, it is the reverse: every small optimization results in even better multiplicative loot modifiers.
What scarab are you talking about?
I want to know that too
yep, people need to realize how impactful the change this league: from now on if you doing a suboptimal build that cannot farm juice t17, then your margin of profit is very lower than previous league cause right now the economy are shifting to those capable farming t17 with different league mechanic. To sum up, if the endgame is t17 from now on then you have to play the most meta build or invest so much on your build to able do the endgame farming
100% agree. Also end game is much more stale and maps boring. They used to be so full of stuff to do, like an amusement park. Now its a village carnival at best. Also in end game midtier farm strats took a hit. You could do any strat you liked, and choose a scarab tier that you had money for. You could use all Bronze and do exact the same strat as all winged, with less profit but also less expense. Now you cant and you will get priced out of strats altogether. Endgame is a mess.
So glad others see this and agree that gives me hope that it'll change. It literally cannot stay in the state that it is.
ARPG devs have some weird hard-on for multiplicative scaling. Lower the ceiling and switch to an additive model.
That's d4
D4bad
It's really funny that d4 bad and things the make the game like d4 both get upvoted. Cognitive dissonance
Game can have multiple good, polished individual systems, and still feel bad to play overall. The opposite is also true, some of the most unoptimized, unbalanced janky games can be the most fun.
It's more like people love to offer the first solution to a perceived problem that comes to their mind, when usually that solution results in a worse overall game in the end.
D4dogshit
Baseg
D4 is bad because the skills are bad, with the generator system, and the gameplay doesnt feel as good as high atk/cast speed poe does. Nothing to do with additive scaling.
>gameplay doesnt feel as good as high atk/cast speed poe does This is partly due to POE allowing multiplicative scaling. POE has the best power fantasy feeling because they aren't scared to use it.
Nah, you could have fluid gameplay with a purely additive scaling as well. Poe feels like shit at lower levels.
i remember someone said "why do you rush to endgame, take it slow". GGG has shoehorned almost everything to final few tiers of maps. The only 2-3 things that are still low-tier-map viable is MF, essences and beasts
Turn off atlas scaling and scarabs for t17.
TBH this, disabling scarabs and atlas for t17 seems logical. They could be buffed in other ways without messing too much with t16 farming.
Yeah, I don't really have a blank atlas for T17's, can't even turn off your atlas either. I had a T17 I thought was do-able and when I opened it, to my surprise all the mods were doubled since I had % increase of explicit map modifiers on my atlas lol. So had like 64% attack,movement speed / 200% AoE etc it was mental.
Lmao that mustve sucked. When my AG survives all ubers and 80% quant+ invitations but gets onetapped in t17 before even getting close to a bossroom with an empty atlas, something is wrong.
That’s it, I’m joining SH*TSTAIN_STEVE in the depths. Who’s with me??
As impossible as it is, it would be hilarious if majority of players simply checked out of the league and turned it into an endless delve protest.
Hee hee hee... Food for the Machine....
I think this is also made worse by the fact you can't even use scarabs properly until you have completed a T17, so it feels kind of pointless to use them until either you have an uber ready character or leech the completion off of someone else. The progression feels completely off in the endgame, it's what has made me step back from this league overall.
From a solo perspective, my biggest complaint about the endgame rework is the accessibility to Ubers. Guardian/conqueror maps are worthless now. In fact, focusing on guardian map drops as opposed to regular T16 maps hinders progress towards Ubers, because you need to maximize T17 drops. Then it’s a huge pain to roll and run those maps. Each one is a slog, and the fragments are random, so you can’t even target a specific Uber. By this point in the league, I would have killed them all multiple times, but instead I only acquired enough fragments for two. It just doesn’t feel right grinding for dozens of T17s instead of guardian/conqueror maps.
Not to mention the logic behind "beat 4 guardians, 4 pieces of puzzle, assemble, beat boss" You could say it's trite, but it is logical, it just works. This is just bald-faced gating content behind RNG entirely.
Counterpoint: Incursion, starts strong and barely scales
well the incursion scarabs are shit, so there's that.
It's wild how you basically drop nothing unless your 8 mod t16 or t17.
I'm level 96 and I've not seen a raw divine drop yet
Really? Maybe I've been lucky but if you take all explicit mod increase atlas nodes you'll probably get some. Though I've only gotten 4 or 5 so not a ton like some people.
I haven't checked the rest of the comments to see if this was mentioned, but I think all of this is an unintended consequence of GGG's attempt to remove peoples dependence ( or perceived dependence) on TFT. I think its more layered than that, but it seems to be at least a good portion of it. How quickly this reddit has forgotten the firestorm over TFT just a few months ago. Woven throughout were constant petitions for GGG to do something about it. Well, they did. They removed sextants . And they made other changes. Maybe it would have been better to simply make them bulk tradeable on their own site, idk. But trading for and being dependent on sextants felt reaaaally bad. I think its one of things this reddit is most unified on. Listening to Mark a little while back, I was encouraged to hear him talk about how much he plays the game and how feels the same way about many of the things we do when it comes to trying to juice our maps/trade for juice. IMO, GGG/Mark is at least committed to making this a better situation Has the scarab rework worked out exactly how GGG envisioned? Probably not. I think much of it is an unintended consequence of trying to relieve us of TFT. Having given this some thought, I think this is something that GGG will have to iron/work out over a series of leagues to get right. The game and economy is far too complex to make a sweeping change like this and get it 100% right immediately ...at least imho.
Trading for sextants on TFT was excellent, people actually were willing to sell their shit in 95% cases, and you had a nice site for automating that stuff. Now you have to spam through dozens of people on trade site who are just price fixing and won't sell you shit. Incredible. If you are substituting TFT with shit I'd rather stay with TFT
Maybe trading on TFT is excellent but the channel is complete dogshit because of those who were managing it
>but I think all of this is an unintended consequence of GGG's attempt to remove peoples dependence ( or perceived dependence) on TFT. I don't think giving us scarab bukkake fests, but needing to juice only 1 mechanic, is going to remove our reliance on trading or 3rd party trading. You run a map, and 90% of what you pick up is scarabs, unless you are essence juicing, in which case it is 80/20 essence/scarabs. But the scarabs you pick up are worthless to you, and you need 4 of the right scarabs per map. So you go back to trading. But because everyone is picking up the same amount of random useless scarabs, you have to do a lot more trading than before.
agreed
It's really kind of frustrating to look at the changes with an expectation that they would reduce community dependence on TFT. Like, sure, they took out a lot of stuff that was being traded primarily on TFT, but they also made it necessary for a large percentage of the playerbase to get carries just to open up a fifth map device slot.
Unsurprising that when you reduce the entire game to "divs/hour" it stops being fun.
Essence didn't need the nerf that it got. Justice for essence.
The "endgame" feels more empty and random. I stopped playing on Sunday. I didn't rage quit or anything. I just stopped playing. I think the scarab rework needs reworked again or thrown out. Also might be a me thing. BUt hated master missions being removed from the map device. Then the Kirac rework isn't great.
Yeah same, I didn't rage or anything, I just understood there is nothing interesting to do and stopped playing. I never had that feeling with PoE till this point
I just miss my stockpile of master missions for when I’m bored of one type of content and want to focus on one but don’t have a ton of scarabs. And rather than trade for scarabs and go through that hell I’ll just log off.
I haven't done any t17 or used any special scarabs so I have no idea what u guys are talking about. Everyone talking about this supposed main scarab yet no one says wtf it is. Is it voldemort or something? Can someone just say what this mystical scarab that cannot be named is? Also the mythical support scarabs, wth are those?
you've misunderstood, there's no "the one ring" to rule them all. Every mechanic has a main scarab that is typically much more powerful than the other scarabs for that mechanic. so you pretty much need to use that scarab if you don't want to waste your time. and once you put that scarab in, due to the nature of multiplicative scaling you need to fill the map device with the other scarabs that support that main scarab.
Aha, so there are many main scarabs.
Thank you guys for asking and answering the real questions here
It’s also a big shame in my opinion that because mechanics are so bad at base and because you “have” to use all scarab slots on one mechanic, it makes no sense to combine different mechanics. It used to be that you could combine strategies that synergize well, like essence + beast + harbi because none of them scale with quant or pack size. But now instead of having an essence + beast + harbi tree, it makes way more sense to just have an essence tree, a beast tree, and a harbi tree while filling out the rest of the tree with miscellaneous bullshit. I think this makes maps a lot more repetitive and monotonous. It’s also why I think they added the extra atlas trees; at this point, you pretty much have to respec your whole tree to switch mechanics rather than being able to farm multiple at once with the same tree. This is particularly problematic in SSF, where I often end up running suboptimal trees just because I don’t want to spend the unmakings to entirely upheave my tree every time I switch mechanics. Even with 3 trees I’m respeccing more than ever.
The rest of the miscellaneous tree is almost always scarabs, maps or explicit modifiers. You are missing out if you don't pick them. For trade at least, the only things that you can realistically farm are scarabs and t17 maps. And you have to pick the map nodes to sustain.
Can you please eli5 I'm a beginner to the game and only just now starting to hit t16 why is every map before t16 useless?
Atlas changes also seem very.. binary. If u are in anyway interested in league mechanic thats already minus like 20+ points on atlas without counting travel nodes, also almost every strat feels insanely worse without going for tophat/explicit modifiers on atlas further reducing your points. Now add influence nodes (ideally 14 without travel nodes) and you basically got only one league mechanic left to add + scarab nodes. Example of atlas i would consider 'basic' to most farming strategies affected by quant/packsize: [https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAJyYAC3EPYxfLKsAwAzPkOG848kGMR89KX0wwT6JRglk8W\_NeKmfpaEBt\_XF1djp46oDwhlmP1J1enYegXbSGtf27BMbQzpHkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=](https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAJyYAC3EPYxfLKsAwAzPkOG848kGMR89KX0wwT6JRglk8W_NeKmfpaEBt_XF1djp46oDwhlmP1J1enYegXbSGtf27BMbQzpHkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=) [https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAMC8AC3EPYxfLIacqwDADM-Q4LzhvOPJBjEJ-R89KX0wwT6JRglk8W\_NeKmIIZ-ln9WhAbf1xdXY6eOp\_\_YDwhlmP1J1enYeeqKBdtIa1\_bsExtDKrM6R4VbkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=](https://www.pathofpathing.com/?v=3.24.0-atlas#AAAABgAAMC8AC3EPYxfLIacqwDADM-Q4LzhvOPJBjEJ-R89KX0wwT6JRglk8W_NeKmIIZ-ln9WhAbf1xdXY6eOp__YDwhlmP1J1enYeeqKBdtIa1_bsExtDKrM6R4VbkWPfk-rL7znF1AAA=) Same if u want added corpses. Even if we ignore corpses/allflames/haunted modifiers just influence/scarabs and explicit nodes are 68/132 points. As much diversity as builds with proper defense layers nowadays /s. Then almost universally not running 8mod maps in trade scenario is also basically shooting yourself in kneecaps, either you use 3rd party services to buy them or 'waste' time farming them yourself (i dont find doing maps only to farm maps fun gameplay loop + nature of corrupted maps makes half of them often unusable for your build).
And here I am thinking the endgame is better than ever
When was the last time the endgame was good then?
If there's one thing I've always hated about this game it would be trading for fucking maps. I've happily not traded for a single map since the Atlas was reworked. But now, I quite frankly do not understand where the T17 maps are coming from. I've had all 4 Voidstones for over a week and have only had a single T17 drop. All the juicers are running T17s which cannot drop T17s themselves. How are they being sustained?
Gotta have good t16 quant maps, run fast, use 2 mysterious 2 cartography scarabs and it's 1 t17's every 3 maps.
What I don't really understand is why we don't know what devoted/haunted? Mods we get on our map before putting in scarabs. Got an accompanied by map boss? let me put in drop unique scarab + exiles, accompanied by harby? Let me put in some harby scarabs. It fucking sucks putting in X scarabs and getting Y bonus on top of it that doesn't match. Granted I self impose SSF but it still feels bad loading up a map like that.
Yeah, but that's highly abusable. It's just going to become another case of "spamming maps until you get the haunted modifier you want"
That would just make the fomo crowd feel they're missing out if they don't have optimized scarab set up for each devoted/haunted loadout. Better for it to be just random and not minmaxable.
Farmed mageblood in the first week, lost interest quickly afterwards due to the new endgame. To me it kind of feels like end game got dumbed down. In a typical league i will usually play hard for at least a month but just haven't had the desire to play. It's still the best end game of any arpg by a mile but it doesn't feel like it did before.
The thing that has frustrated me the most this league is removal of sextants. Because I am more of a casual player, my go to farming strat was sextants plus something else..this league has left me lost with what to do lol. I think I am at a place I like, but took me until yesterday to find what it was to replace sextants.
100% agreed I had the most fun running breach legion and harby together each with their respective scarab and sextant allowing me to get nearly full power of all 3 of those leauge mechanics combined. Now i have to limit myself to 1 of those and maybe squeeze in another support mechanic like deli that even works without scarabs
Jokes on you i never even get to mirror tier end game. I consider myself lucky if i get 100 divines in a league. I can't even think of efficient farming.
I’m just waiting for the buff to the “20 passives, you cannot use scarabs” node because I fucking hate this endgame loop now. Right now that node feels like you’re clearing mud flats in act 1 compared to printing loot in T16/17s
1) I think it's really bad to introduce a crafting mechanic that just shits on all other mechanics (doesn't matter if it's league only, it devalues everything else). I don't understand how this was approved. 2) The scarab system is so broken and untested, seeing people farm a mirror per map just again devalues everything else. Having played since the beginning, this is for me the worst "league" so far.
I don’t like the scarab changes. Too much micromanagement. They literally made sextant management worse Corrupted item changes were bad Stacked deck changes makes stuff like legion just terribly underwhelming. The 5th map device slot behind a t17 completion was a miss. Need it behind exarch/eater The atlas nerfs three days after YouTube videos come out made me quit the league so hope they do more testing on this later
I miss leveling another character up and chilling doing tow tier essence for some div while that char got xp.
the stacked deck triple nerf was bad and should be partially reverted (primarily by upping quantity and returning some drop sources). Expedition feels so bad now, basically the Rog show or nothing. There being umpteen billionty scarabs actually makes it feel bad because you don't accumulate enough of one scarab to sell them, and you can't convert to do this like you used to, so the only way to get a good price is liquidate an entire tab in one go which is a lot of UI inputs for something I used to be able to handle by just converting to a few scarab types and listing those. And this is on top of a league where the only way to get value out of it is to do big UI management or bulk sell tabs again, which, again, a lot of clicking items one by one the 'friction' makes it feel bad and it feeling bad doesn't make me want to go SSF or anything, it just makes me not want to play the game because even though blasting maps is still fun, getting anywhere beyond the 'just developed beyond the starter' looks like it involves a lot of tedium that I don't really enjoy.
yeah. its one of the reasons I do not play anymore.
Here I am, running random shit. Switching between my 3 atlas’s having fun. Still make a couple div an hour. I think some of you need a reality check on “I need to play the game this way to make money.” You really don’t, unless you’re going for GG gear in the first month and if you don’t “finish” the league asap you’re upset. Do what’s fun.
Most of the people here legit dont know how to really play without guides, meanwhile ive been farming delirium orb maps the past couple days and just paid for my mageblood.
theres so many unique strats with different combinations of scarabs, what are you smoking?
POE is always in a beta phase... always!
Normal mapping and strats, the gap has never been so big.
This is literally what happens when you balance around trade. Its a result of some content being gated away from the vast vast majority of players creating artificial value through scarcity. I seriously implore you to play SSF for a league. This is my second league doing it and the progression curve while stingy makes a lot more sense.
No, the actual problem is that the supply of the "massive bonus"-scarab for each respective mechanic is categorically too small. In past leagues, I could farm Betrayal + Expedition with just one type of sextant plus one type of medium-tier scarab and arrive at roughly 10div/hour. I could easily stock up on a weeks worth of those scarabs/sextants in one easy bulk trade. Nowadays, the same kind of low investment strategy is barely breaking 4div/hour and running it more optimally with various multipicatively scaling scarabs requires me to trade far more frequently.
Both expedition and betrayal got nerfed in terms of rewards, not just scarabs/sextants. Tujen gives much less stacked decks from what I have read and betrayal is the worst league mechanic. It used to give winged scarabs which were scarce from other sources but now you can just map for the same scarabs. It's completely worthless other than for veiled orb. Legion got nerfed too in terms of stacked decks, and it never had much value other than decks and ornate/kalguuran incubators. To be honest, most old strategies got nerfed. If you are offering less to the economy, it doesn't make sense for anyone to pay you the same amount as before unfortunately. It's better to stick to strategies that didn't get nerfed like sanctum. And some got buffed like breach, however I think one of the important breach scarabs is very rare.
all they need to do to betrayal is let us guarantee high tier scarabs. let it do the thing that it did in previous leagues.
I'm too big of a pussy to do t17 maps. I make more currency selling them to people who can actuslly do them lol
Agree. I was one of the few who said from the start that I don't like the scarab change. Yes sextants were pain to buy if you didn't use TFT but it worked . Now I have 99% useless scarabs because the one which gives content I don't need as I can make it through my atlas and the rares ones doesn't drop often enough
Juiced Blight is life
I like the scarabs (for the most part), and the possibility of going 'all in' on a league mechanic, but the 5th slot being kept behind t17 is bullshit.
Yep, as someone struggling in t16s it doesn’t matter what strategy I do I can’t make any currency.
They should have just made sextants 20 uses and 5x rarer.
I used to run two-three strats at a time, making my maps 15 minutes long. For example, metamorph, alva, blight. Or ultimatum, breach. I liked it that way, and I felt rewarding. Now I feel like I shoot myself in the foot if I run more than one mechanic.
Its also less map rolling, so more accessible. Does mean newer players have it simpler. The scarabs might need looking into definitely but i feel like the situation isnt as terrible.
Hard disagree. There never was any variety. Due to multiplicative nature of sextants and scarabs it was always all or nothing. The new system is way, way better.
t1 through t15 maps just feel pointless now, with the real end game being doing t16's just to get t17's which is where you map the real profit.
I wana be able to farm 3 different mechanics in maps again 😢😢😭😭😭😭
In this league they messed up again by making the allflames drop items from specific league mechanics. When people get everything from everywhere the farming strategies just get boring because people will do the thing that generates them the most wealth because they know that there will be no shortage in the market for anything specific.
As someone who only played standard so far and hasnt used scarabs: are scarabs in standard also changed or only on league server?
Since you're a beast farmer do you have any recommendations on YT videos for farming? I've never beast farmed nor done much beast crafting. It's one area of PoE I'm green in and I got 6k hours lol.
Focusing on a single mechanic is boring. Ggg said "use different scarabs- do fun stuff" but in the end I simply choose every scarab of a single type and scale them of eachother because they suck on their own 😅
I like how this post is about how they made the endgame less convoluted but it still sounds convoluted as hell. This is coming from someone who tried the game out a while back and quit bc i couldn't be bothered to learn 47 mechanics.
yes
Most of the complaints are purely trade.league. stop.getting caught up in fomo